What makes a successful Chief Data Officer?

When Gartner’s research vice-pres­i­dent Mario Faria said that by the end of 2019, 50 per cent of chief data offi­cers would be seen to fail, it was hard­ly the stuff of recruit­ment posters. Yet Mr Faria also said that by that time 90 per cent of large com­pa­nies would have a chief data offi­cer (CDO) – a remark­able rise for a job that didn’t exist at the turn of the cen­tu­ry.

Suc­cess is hard to judge, espe­cial­ly in a role that has yet to be well defined by indus­try, while fail­ure can be stark­ly obvi­ous. If your com­pa­ny is on the front pages for a major data breach or pri­va­cy vio­la­tion, it’s a bad day to be CDO.

How do CDOs measure their success?

To find out what makes a good day, and how suc­cess can be planned for and mea­sured, the views of two CDOs from two very dif­fer­ent organ­i­sa­tions, one in finan­cial ser­vices, the oth­er in sci­en­tif­ic research, are infor­ma­tive. Both agree that the bot­tom line for suc­cess is in the over­all health of the organ­i­sa­tion; from there, things diverge.

Nic Orton is chief data offi­cer for Lex­is­Nex­is Risk Solu­tions, a glob­al data ana­lyt­ics organ­i­sa­tion that pro­vides cus­tomer insight to the finan­cial ser­vices sec­tor and oth­er indus­tries. “The suc­cess of my role is con­sid­ered in the ulti­mate per­for­mance of the busi­ness, but more direct­ly I ensure we use the right data in the right way,” he says. “There is a con­sen­sus that the data uni­verse is dou­bling every two years, with a 50-fold growth between 2010 and 2020. I pro­mote inno­va­tion, but also ensure focus and trust.”

The suc­cess of my role is con­sid­ered in the ulti­mate per­for­mance of the busi­ness

To that end, says Mr Orton, his suc­cess depends on cre­at­ing a com­mon lan­guage for data between busi­ness units inside the organ­i­sa­tion, and thence out to cus­tomers and part­ners. “We have four main met­rics: uplift to prod­ucts through added val­ue; insight and intel­li­gence for our­selves on cus­tomers, com­peti­tors and mar­kets; poten­tial for advanced ana­lyt­ics; and qual­i­ty.”

Qual­i­ty is judged in sev­en dimen­sions, includ­ing com­plete­ness, valid­i­ty and con­sis­ten­cy. “When you see your lan­guage being used else­where in the organ­i­sa­tion, it builds con­fi­dence that there’s clar­i­ty across the organ­i­sa­tion, which means we build trust in our­selves that we are using data cor­rect­ly,” says Mr Orton. “That becomes vis­i­ble out­side the organ­i­sa­tion and builds trust in rela­tion­ships.” In this way, gov­er­nance stops being a hin­drance to build­ing a company’s use of data and starts to sup­port it; a sign of a job well done.

A chief data officer’s success should flow from an organisation’s digital strategy

Bren­den Dal­ton, CDO and chief infor­ma­tion offi­cer for the Com­mon­wealth Sci­en­tif­ic and Indus­tri­al Research Organ­i­sa­tion in Can­ber­ra, over­sees data for more than 5,000 peo­ple engaged in dis­parate research. He focus­es on man­ag­ing data risk against oppor­tu­ni­ty. “The suc­cess cri­te­ria for a chief data offi­cer need to flow from an organisation’s dig­i­tal strat­e­gy,” he says. “If that push­es dis­rup­tion, for exam­ple, then the CDO needs to work with a high­er tol­er­ance to data risk.”

Although CDOs have strug­gled to com­mu­ni­cate the nature of data risk in the past, times have changed.  “With the help of Face­book CEO Mark Zucker­berg and his evi­dence to the US Con­gress, boards are com­ing to under­stand risk,” says Mr Dal­ton. “Data risk, par­tic­u­lar­ly impact­ing rep­u­ta­tion and social licence to oper­ate, is a new and evolv­ing area. Organ­i­sa­tion­al gov­er­nance mod­els are slow to change and don’t yet appro­pri­ate­ly sup­port the CDO.”

While he agrees that suc­cess in his role involves bring­ing dif­fer­ent parts of his organ­i­sa­tion into a com­mon appre­ci­a­tion of the nature of data, his vast­ly more het­ero­ge­neous world has neces­si­tat­ed a dif­fer­ent approach to that of Mr Orton. “Gov­er­nance is a chal­lenge. Each sci­en­tif­ic dis­ci­pline has its own way of doing data, so we need a nov­el approach, cre­at­ing a net­work of data cham­pi­ons and encour­ag­ing each of our busi­ness units to insti­tute its own data gov­er­nance,” says Mr Dal­ton.

The chief data offi­cer pro­vides the tools for this, he says, such as high-lev­el organ­i­sa­tion­al prin­ci­ples and cen­tralised ethics, pri­va­cy and reg­u­la­to­ry com­pli­ance advice. “We’re build­ing a data ecosys­tem inter­nal­ly and with part­ners, and we’re tri­alling a social archi­tec­ture to sup­port this.”

A successful CDO uses their imagination 

So a suc­cess­ful CDO needs to unite an organ­i­sa­tion in its appre­ci­a­tion of data risk and decide on the right lev­el of over­sight for busi­ness units, and how much free­dom to give them. But a fail­ure in imag­i­na­tion and inno­va­tion can lead to a per­cep­tion of fail­ure over­all, accord­ing to Mr Orton.

“Here’s an exam­ple,” he says. “Your bank knows more about you than any­one else; when you buy cof­fee, who your ener­gy sup­pli­er is, how much you get paid, what you like to spend mon­ey on. It’s a huge data asset, and by and large they do noth­ing with it. If I were a bank, I’d find ways to lever­age that through app-dri­ven rec­om­men­da­tions, cus­tomer insight – the works.

A fail­ure in imag­i­na­tion and inno­va­tion can lead to a per­cep­tion of fail­ure over­all

“Instead, you just have the prod­uct divi­sion think­ing about increas­ing mon­eti­sa­tion and app design­ers think­ing about user expe­ri­ence. The CDO should be able to see the entire busi­ness and sug­gest data-dri­ven inno­va­tion.”

Mr Dal­ton has his sights set even high­er, at entire­ly new lev­els of CDO inno­va­tion. “We are focus­ing on data man­age­ment as a research activ­i­ty in its own right, work­ing through how we use the inter­net of things and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence to cre­ate the future dig­i­tal indus­tri­al plat­form. We are going to look beyond automat­ing data inges­tion, qual­i­ty analy­sis, ana­lyt­ics and so on, to pro­vid­ing reg­u­la­to­ry assur­ance, over­sight and address social risk.”

Whether the ulti­mate suc­cess of the future CDO will be automat­ing them­selves out of a job is per­haps a more philo­soph­i­cal than prac­ti­cal con­cern, at least for now.

READ MORE: C‑Suite: who they are, what they do and why they mat­ter